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Blizzard Announces Battle for Azeroth and WoW Classic

The expected event from the opening ceremony of BlizzCon came to pass when Blizzard announced the next expansion for World of Warcraft.

Battle for Azeroth

The setting is a renewed struggle between the Alliance and the Horde. Initial details and the cinematic can be found on the Battle For Azeroth site now up.

In what I can only call a surprise turn of events, given the company’s outlook up to this point, Blizzard also announced that they were working on a restoration of vanilla WoW.

Classic Vanilla Flavor

Called World of Warcraft Classic, there were no details presented as to when or how this might come to pass, just that it is now officially a work in progress. We shall see what comes of with this. But they have a video at least.

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9 thoughts on “Blizzard Announces Battle for Azeroth and WoW Classic”

Going to be very interesting to see just how “Classic” this is – if it ever happens. Based on the EQ/EQ2 experience it will be reminiscent of the original at best. I suspect it will work best for people like me, who missed Vanilla but wish they hadn’t. People who were really there won’t be able to stop noticing how it isn’t exactly as they remember it. Still, as the EQ ones proved, even a pale copy of the original is a lot better than no version of the original at all.

I’ll clear my diary for, oh, shall we say 2020? Or is that being over-optimistic?

@Bhagpuss – Yes, the battle here has just begun. On the bright side they now appear committed to this venture. On the flip side, after finally getting on board with the idea who knows how long it is going to take. It is always easier to remake something a second time than it was the first time, but Blizzard waited so long that they have no doubt complicated things. Ah well.

And then there is the What is Vanilla WoW? question that I asked a year and a half ago. Different people will think of different things when you say vanilla, as anywhere from beta to the day before Cataclysm launched has some claim on that.

And after that, do these servers stay static? Do they progress? How far do you go, who dictates how fast, and where do they end?

Still, I have no doubt that, once this goes live, their biggest problem will be overcrowding.

Wait, what? Can’t Blizzard just take one of the vanilla servers already running, slap some paint on it, and ship it? Seems like that’s all people really want anyway—the ability to play the existing vanilla servers in an approved and long-term stable way. I know that losing my Nostalrius character was pretty much the end of vanilla for me, but I’d be vaguely tempted by an official vanilla server running the same code.

@anypo8 – Say what you want about Blizzard, they have high standards for how things work. I suspect that some developer within Blizz looked at the Nostalrius code for about 20 minutes than came in the next day and declared it would be easier just to re-write the whole thing from scratch. (Because I’ve lived that very scenario a number of times in my life.)

Anyway, you can bet that Blizz will want to charge for WoW Classic, and if you ask for money people start losing their tolerance for quirks and bugs and want stuff fixed and supported and working with their specific hardware configuration and so on. For this to work within the Blizzard ecosystem, Blizz has to do it their way.

But you can just bet that they’ll now be shutting down any private/pirate server where more than three people congregate because money is now on the line.

Recent history tells me they are going to find a way to screw up ‘vanilla’, but we will see. If they actually make it true to vanilla, I’d expect a lot of post-WotLK WoW players to rage rather quickly, especially due to the dungeon difficulty.

They can take two directions, a true vanilla, which the look to the likes of the emerald dreams like servers where they are as historically accurate as possible….or they can tweek it and have it vanilla 2.0 where they use the updated graphics and remake it. Ive been on a few private servers and while i love the nostalga of the game play…the character graphics are hard to look at after you get used to the new upgrades…so I would play either. But can you upgrade vanillas graphics and still call it vanilla …or classic?

Secondly I watched the blizcon feeds via virtual ticket and they said potientally more allied races to be added. I am desperately hoping for ogres for horde….oh god I just have to have a ogre mage.

I will definitely play on this new-Vanilla server. I want to go back to the time when guilds still meant something, when servers policed themselves and groups were formed from being able to pick from players based on reputation, skill and knowledge. No LFD or being forced to group with complete strangers.

There were a LOT of patches that were released during Vanilla before the first expansion came out, and it will be interesting to see how they gate end game content – such as opening the AQ40 gates, and all of the consumables that were needed to be gathered.